>- Speaking of Hoax virus warnings,, Paul Walker said this to Scott Hoffman 
on 05 Apr 97  14:58 -<
 SH> programmer and I create a e-mail program which is widely distributed
 SH> worldwide which has the capabaility to run programs or scripts
 SH> directly from e-mail?
 PW> Then you'd be remarkably stupid.
 PW> No - /if/ you did that it would make it possible. At the moment, it
 PW> isn't, because nobody's stupid enough to write a reader like that.
Maybe not stupid.  One of the points here is that someone could _deliber-
ately_ do it, and not tell anyone until way too late.  Imagine if you had
a mailer that as it was picking up pieces of mail, it just happened to
search through and look for a phrase like "*KILL*".  If it finds it, then
it, for example, deletes all files on disk.  So no-one writes any
messages with that pharse.  Sometime later the program gets to be the
most popular mailer by far, and everyone's using it.  Then one day the nasty
person who wrote it goes out and sends a message "Hi. *KILL*" to everyone it
could find on the internet, and worldwide havoc occurs.
I don't think we're talking about stupidity...just no-one's really done it,
or had their mailer popular enough or something.
Btw, kiddies, don't try the above at home :-) It would take way too long :-)
Steve
... "It is time." - Rafiki, at 7:00 EST, Sunday, November 3rd, 1996.
--- FMailX 1.22a+ / RA2.50+
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